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Trump’s attorney general pick faces vote amid Muslim ban debates

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Trump’s attorney general pick faces vote amid Muslim ban debates

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Feb 02, 2017 Author : admin

Posted in: CURRENT AFFAIRS

U.S. President Donald Trump’s choice for attorney general faces vote a day after Trump fired U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates following her remarks blasting the legality of the controversial immigration Muslim ban.

Trump has drawn ire from human rights advocates after he last week signed an executive order temporarily barring immigrants from six Muslim-majority countries – Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Somali, Libya and Sudan – from entering the U.S. and banning Syrians indefinitely.

Trump’s choice for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, faces a vote from the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, which will either approve or dismiss Sessions’ nomination.

Sessions has been heavily criticized for his allegations of racism, which were the highlight of his confirmation hearings earlier this month. If the nomination of Sessions, who’s a conservative senator, is approved, U.S. Senate will vote on it by the end of this week.

Sessions was grilled during his confirmation hearings earlier this month for allegedly supporting the Ku Klux Klan and once calling a black assistant U.S. attorney “boy.”

During the confirmation hearings, Sessions dismissed the racism claims and said allegations of his support for the KKK are “damnably false.” Sessions once joked he had thought KKK was “OK until I found out they smoked pot.”

“I abhor the Klan and what it represents and its hateful ideology,” Sessions said during the confirmation hearings and also denied the “boy” allegations.

In 1986, Sessions was denied a federal judgeship after the judiciary committee heard him testify about his comments on racism.

The news comes a day after Trump fired on Monday U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates, who questioned the legality of the Muslim travel ban. She was replaced by Dana Boente, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who urged to comply with the U.S. President’s executive order.

Even though there are lawyers who say Trump’s executive order is legal, the U.S. President is facing a great deal of criticism from the U.S. judicial system.

In fact, several days after the U.S. President signed the executive order barring immigrants from the seven Muslim countries from entering the U.S., federal judges in four states granted an emergency stay to prevent deportation of foreign visitors with valid visas who were detained at U.S. airports.

While it’s unlikely that the debate over the legality of Trump’s order will subside in the coming weeks or months, political experts think it’s likely that the White House could add more countries to the infamous Muslim ban list, including Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.